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Cumulus Discusses 2014 Plans For Nash

During yesterday’s quarterly earnings conference calls, Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey revealed some of the company’s next round of initiatives for the Nash brand expansion.

Once the Westwood One purchase by the company closes, Cumulus plans on transitioning all of its Country network programming to the Nash brand. Dickey stated “there’ll be a dedicated product offering to the broadcast community for NASH, everything from licensing the IP to getting on the promotions and the events and the digital aspects of it, and even the merchandising.” That will enable other broadcasters to license the Nash brand from Cumulus to allow them to expand into markets where the company doesn’t operate stations.

Nash Magazine, which debuted in the Atlanta market earlier this year will rollout nationally in the first half of 2014. A video component will follow in the second half of the year.

This is really going to be more of a — as we said, think of NASH as ESPN for country and so we’re going to be doing platform deals with advertisers for web, for video, for radio, for digital audio, for online and events. And so it’s going to be — rather than treat this as a standalone magazine, it’s going to be part of an overall platform by — for advertisers. That’s the way we’re doing it. It is going to have national distribution, and we’re working with AMI on that. So I think that ultimately we would expect to see in Walmarts and Targets across the country, as well as drug stores, and it will be widely distributed. Ultimately, as it takes off, there will be — and we’re also going to be exploring subscription models for NASH to have premium content and then potentially magazines delivered to homes and things like that. So there’s going to be a lot be a lot of different things. This is — there’s going to be a lot of experimenting that we’re going to be going in 2014 to figure out how to best optimize this content platform that we think is very, very special

Among other topics discussed by Dickey in the conference call, he stated much of the further growth in the company will come by expansion in the top 50 markets, the company will begin to create national channels for its Rdio.com investment but will not aggregate existing content in 2014, and the company has around $100 million in land and towers that it could seek to divest.